[Hiring] Site Reliability Engineer @Kong

Role Description

As a Site Reliability Engineer, you’ll join the global Platform SRE team responsible for building, operating, and scaling Kong’s multi-region SaaS platform that powers the world’s API connectivity. You’ll design, automate, and run production systems serving thousands of customers across AWS, GCP, and Azure. This is a hands-on role ideal for engineers who thrive on running production SaaS systems at scale, automating operations, and continuously improving performance, resilience, and deployment pipelines.

What You’ll Do

• Operate and scale Kong’s global SaaS platform (Konnect), ensuring reliability, availability, and performance across regions and clouds.
• Build, automate, and maintain Kubernetes-based infrastructure and deployment workflows using Terraform/Terragrunt, Helm, and ArgoCD.
• Design, maintain, and optimize multi-region data and caching layers — including PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, and Druid — for high availability and low latency.
• Operate and improve Kong Gateway and Kong Mesh environments supporting hybrid and distributed architectures.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows to automate service delivery and ensure consistent infrastructure changes.
• Enhance observability and incident response readiness through systems like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and Thanos, defining and tracking SLOs.
• Collaborate closely with development and security teams to ensure smooth operation of SaaS services in compliance with reliability, security, and regulatory standards.
• Participate in a global 24/7 on-call rotation and drive continuous improvement of operational playbooks and postmortem practices.
• Lead and contribute to scaling initiatives that improve elasticity, reliability, and cost-efficiency across the SaaS platform.

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• Proven experience managing SaaS or PaaS systems at enterprise scale (multi-region, multi-tenant, secure environments).
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including debugging cluster/networking issues and designing for fault tolerance and scalability.
• Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform or Terragrunt.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Atlantis, Helm).
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages (Go, Python, Bash) for automation and tooling.
• Solid understanding of Linux/Unix systems, networking (DNS, TLS/SSL, HTTP), load balancers, and distributed systems.
• Experience working with API gateway and service mesh technologies.
• Familiarity with streaming systems like Kafka and observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Experience working in a 24/7/365 production support environment.

Bonus Points

• Hands-on experience with Kong Gateway, Kong Mesh, or similar service connectivity technologies.
• Experience operating ClickHouse, Druid, or other time-series and analytics databases.
• Experience managing PostgreSQL and Redis in multi-region configurations.
• Working knowledge of AWS networking (PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, VPC Peering, Firewalls), Azure VNet, or GCP NCC.
• Strong understanding of disaster recovery, resiliency testing, and compliance-driven reliability practices.

Company Description

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com .